PhotoshopUser.2020.04.April

Company: Morten Carlsen

Price: $35.99

Rating: 2.5

Hot: Interface; good when you’re clueless

regarding white balance

Not: Results may be off, depending on the

white in your scene; doesn’t work with

color correction plug-ins; seemingly not

based on standard color theory or color

management practices

Review by Erik Vlietinck

Tool for Beginner Colorists

Pro Color

Monitor

The developer of the Pro Color Monitor app has found a new use

for false color. He’s correcting color casts of footage and photos

using whatever white there is in the shot, based on a false color

overlay frame that floats above your NLE or image editor.

Pro Color Monitor relies on saturated, mostly complementary,

false color to evaluate if the original colors are correct or have a

color cast. For example, white with a yellow cast is rendered in blue

and, to correct it, you’ll have to move your editor’s color controls

toward blue to get the tint of white that you remember from the

scene when you shot it.

There are a couple of issues with this approach, though. To

work with Pro Color Monitor, you’ll need a calibrated monitor

to evaluate your adjustments using the actual image and, as the

interaction of color taught by Joseph Albers, former professor of

art at Yale University, has proven we’d better not trust our eyes

for color adjustments. And more recent psychological exper-

iments show that our memories can’t be trusted to accurately

reproduce past events.

Yet, in the video tutorial the developer suggests to white bal-

ance an image based on a seemingly white area—a white wall

or a white stripe in a sweater. Neither of these are standard,

while, as Albers’ experiments have shown, adjacent colors can

interact in ways that fool the eye into seeing one color while it’s

actually another.

A color target like a ColorChecker can help, but if you’re knowl-

edgeable enough to use those, you’re probably knowledgeable

enough to do without Pro Color Monitor. If you have experience

with histograms, scopes, etc., it’s faster than anything else you’d

throw in the equation. And if you can’t remember what the com-

plementary is, you can look it up on your editor’s color wheel. n

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